


The Soldier

by Allison_Wonderland



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Gen, Mild Angst, Retrospective, WW1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-11
Updated: 2018-11-11
Packaged: 2019-08-21 20:46:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16583873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Allison_Wonderland/pseuds/Allison_Wonderland
Summary: We will remember them.





	The Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me:  
That there’s some corner of a foreign field  
That is for ever England.

The Soldier  
Rupert Brooke

 

Even now, more than a decade on, Jack had to forcibly hold himself in at the sound of gunfire. The urge to flee still erupted like it did in the trenches, bombarded on every side, deafened from the sounds of mortar fire. 

Worse still were the sounds of silence, the waiting. In the thick of the fighting, you could not think, you could not see for all the smoke, you could only act on instinct and sheer determination. But at night, in times of quiet, all you could do was think, fear, wait. Mourning those lost that day, knowing that tomorrow, they could be mourning you. 

Every sunrise he took as a gift, the riot of color so welcome against the bleak mud. Every one he tried to savor, knowing it may be his last, that he would never see that night’s sunset. Every day, with a bowed head, he prayed to a God he wasn’t sure he believed in anymore, to bless the fallen, to keep him safe.

It was a tradition he kept. Every morning when he woke, now usually in a comfortable bed, far from mud, he bowed his head for them, the ones that stayed in Flanders mud, a piece of England forever. 

Especially today, this eleventh day, this eleventh month. This morning he awoke in heaven, soft bed, soft Phryne. That morning he awoke in hell. But,for the first time, he did not fear the silence that would come. The last shots fired as the eleventh hour came, then silence. Then birdsong. He had survived. He would survive. Part of his soul was still in that mud with those who never returned but he would survive. 

Jack stood in the window and watched the sun rise, head bowed in prayer.

 

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:  
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.  
At the going down of the sun and in the morning  
We will remember them.

For the Fallen  
Laurence Binyon


End file.
